API enhancement: get full route for nested resource

If I use nested resources I sometimes have to deal with generic route names. Say I have a users and companies route and both have a nested resource address, which I can operate on with users/:id/address and companies/:id/address.

Now I want to enhance the restangularized element with custom logic inside Restangular.setOnElemRestangularized, but I need to treat the address of a user differently than the address of a company. I can’t just look into the route param, because it is address in both cases. I need to check elem.parentResource.route, too. It could look like this:

Restangular.setOnElemRestangularized(function(elem, isCollection, route) {
  if(elem.parentResource.route + '/' + route === 'companies/address') { /* do stuff */ }
  if(elem.parentResource.route + '/' + route === 'users/address') { /* do stuff */ }
});

This can become quite verbose and error prone. It becomes even worse with deeper nested resources or in more generic situations where I have to make sanity checks (e.g. is elem.parentResource defined?).

It would be very useful to get the full route of a resource like this:

Restangular.setOnElemRestangularized(function(elem, isCollection, route) {
  if(elem.getFullRoute() === 'companies/address') { /* do stuff */ }
  if(elem.getFullRoute() === 'users/address') { /* do stuff */ }
});

.getFullRoute() would basically recursively prepend every existing parentResource.route separated by a /. elem.getFullRoute() would be equal to elem.route for every non-nested resource.

function getFullRoute(elem) {
  var parentRoute = '';
  if(elem.parentResource) {
    parentRoute = getFullRoute(elem.parentResource) + '/';
  }
  return parentRoute + elem.route;
}

What do you think?

[vincentdieltiens]

I ran into the same issue. I have customers/contacts and suppliers/contacts which are different.

The next solution seems to work well :

1. Define the getFullRoute method (this is an iterative version. don’t know if recursive whould be better)

function getFullRoute(elem) {
  var currentElem = elem
  var fullRoute = [];

  do {
    fullRoute.splice(0, 0, currentElem.route);
    currentElem = currentElem.parentResource;
  }
  while(currentElem !== null);

  return fullRoute.join('/');
}

1. Add line to config.transformElem to get the full route of the element and try to get the transformers of the full route before getting the transformers of the route.

config.transformElem = function(elem, isCollection, route, Restangular, force) {
    if (!force && !config.transformLocalElements && !elem[config.restangularFields.fromServer]) {
      return elem;
    }

    var fullRoute = getFullRoute(elem);
    var typeTransformers = config.transformers[fullRoute] || config.transformers[route];
    var changedElem = elem;
    if (typeTransformers) {
        _.each(typeTransformers, function(transformer) {
           changedElem = transformer(isCollection, changedElem);
        });
    }
    return config.onElemRestangularized(changedElem,
      isCollection, route, Restangular);
};

With that small changes, extendModel will work like this :

Restangular.extendModel('customers/contacts', function(model) {
  // ...
});
Restangular.extendModel('suppliers/contacts', function(model) {
  // ...
});

What do you think ?

[end-user]

This issue is still open and still seems relevant. Is there a workaround or a fix? How can I apply custom methods to nested model objects?